Tag Archives: government

The Declassification Engine: Your One-Stop Shop for Government Secrets | Wired Enterprise | Wired.com

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A fascinating article about researchers developing the “Declassification Engine” – a tool to analyze declassified documents in the United States.

In many cases, documents are declassified only because individuals will request them under the Freedom of Information Act, and this often means they’re spread to the four winds. “There are a lot of declassified documents out there. Some of them are in historians’ basements. Some are in specific libraries. Some are in digital archives. And they’re in different formats. No one has systematically collected them into a searchable, usable, user-friendly database,” says Columbia law professor David Pozen.

The Declassification Engine seeks to remedy this, but that’s only the first step. Columbia’s Matthew Connelly first dreamed up the idea when he realized that although more and more government documents are now created in electronic format, a dwindling percentage are declassified in electronic format. The rise of digital records, he told himself, should provide more opportunities for researchers, not less.

See the full article: The Declassification Engine: Your One-Stop Shop for Government Secrets | Wired Enterprise | Wired.com.

Closure of fisheries’ libraries called ‘a ‘disaster’ for science | Canada.com

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Closure of fisheries’ libraries called ‘a ‘disaster’ for science | Canada.com

Quotables

“Seven DFO libraries across Canada are to close by the fall, including two that have been amassing books and technical reports on the aquatic realm for more than a century.”

“It is information destruction unworthy of a democracy,” said Peter Wells, an ocean pollution expert at Dalhousie University in Halifax, who describes the closing of the libraries as a “national tragedy.”

“It will likely be a decade or more before all DFO’s technical reports are all digitized and available online, the librarian said.  But most of the reference books and materials in the DFO libraries – like Russia’s fishing monograms – cannot be digitized by the department because of copyright restrictions.”

“Wells see the library closures as more evidence of the way the federal government is “eviscerating” aquatic science by cutting jobs and eliminating programs, labs and services. “Libraries cannot simply be replaced by digitized collections,” he said.”

TechCrunch | White House Announces National Day Of Civic Hacking, Asks Americans To Solve Problems With Govt Data From NASA And More

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The Canadian Government needs to pilot a program like this! Unfortunately, I can’t imagine this happening with a Harper government. We need to advocate for more open data and a transparent government, especially with government budgets and programs funded by taxpayer wallets.

White House Announces National Day Of Civic Hacking, Asks Americans To Solve Problems With Govt Data From NASA And More | TechCrunch.

N.B. At the bottom of the article is a map of America…all the cities that have signed up are quite similar to the distribution of Democratic states.  Also can’t see a Republican government launching a program like this. Obama rocks.